MONTREAL — A classical scholar with a long career as a university administrator, Guy Berthiaume, who will become the new head of Library and Archives Canada (LAC) on June 23, is not someone who seeks the spotlight.

But as chairman and director of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) for the past five years, Berthiaume, 63, has been a constant and unwavering presence — interviewing Quebec vedettes on cable TV about their favourite books, chairing meetings with members of cultural communities on how to make the library more welcoming, overseeing the upcoming redesign of the ground floor of the BAnQ’s Grande Bibliothèque and, this month, launching the provincial library’s first fundraising campaign.

With 2.5 million visitors each year, the downtown library has the highest attendance in the francophone world and is among the most popular in North America. A bustling hub that has innovated in digital book-lending and the digitization of Quebec’s provincial archives, the BAnQ, which opened in 2005 and has an annual budget of $90 million, is a runaway success.

Can Berthiaume repeat that success at the trouble-plagued LAC? It’s a tall order at an institution that has been demoralized by budget cuts and leaderless since May 2013, when the previous head, Daniel Caron, resigned amid controversy over personal expenses, including $4,500 for Spanish lessons. Caron oversaw $10 million in budget cuts that reduced staff and acquisitions, all but eliminated interlibrary loans and prompted nationwide protest. The current budget is $99.2 million.

Berthiaume sat down with The Gazette to reflect on what his five years at the BAnQ have taught him about the role of libraries in the digital age and to share his vision for Library and Archives Canada.

Gazette: After five years at the head of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, how do you see the future of libraries?

Berthiaume: Libraries are in the process of reinventing themselves. Our relevance as gathering places, as places that provide access to culture, as centres of knowledge, all that is not being challenged by digital technology.

We provide an essential refuge from urban isolation, because people are very isolated in our society. Libraries are still relevant, important places and I would even say they are even more and more so.

At the same time, we embrace digital technology, we use it and we make the most of it.

I think libraries have an excellent future. And this is not an abstract vision; it’s a reality, because people continue to come in great numbers. We have 2.5 million visitors each year.

Gazette: When you look back over the past five years, which achievements make you proudest?

Berthiaume: There are two things of which I am very proud.

The first is how we have opened ourselves up to newcomers.

We developed a website for new immigrants. We have a section of books aimed at newcomers. We have a language centre where people can learn French and English. Our volunteers, the Friends of BAnQ, have French conversation groups.

We set up a children’s story hour in eight languages, including Mandarin, Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian and Arabic.

We recently held a series of conferences on immigration in Quebec, called Histoires d’immigration, that started with the Scottish and went right up to people from central Africa, including the Italian, Greek and Vietnamese communities.

I was really happy to do this at a time when the climate last year was so difficult (with the debate over the proposed charter of values), as you remember.

The other thing is the work we did on the democratization of culture.

Here, we have 2.5 million people who come to the library, who borrow items from mainstream culture, novels by Danielle Steel and Dan Brown, television series, movies, video games.

I wanted to use that leverage, the high attendance here, to provide access to cultural products with which many of our visitors are not necessarily familiar.

That’s why I invited the Opéra de Montréal to the library. I invited the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. We held conferences on Plato and we had a full house in the auditorium.

I did a series of interviews (on cable TV), La bibliothèque de …, with well-known personalities, standup comics, actors, singers, who came to talk about their favourite books.

Gazette: What surprised you the most during your time as head of the BAnQ?

Berthiaume: One of the things that surprised me the most is people’s passion for genealogy. There’s a very popular British TV series, Who Do You Think You Are? Radio-Canada did a similar show called Qui êtes-vous? Each episode started out here in our archives. It generated a lot of interest. After the show, a lot of people came to our website to try to find their ancestors.

The other thing that really blew me away, which was really a wonderful surprise, is how much people read. You always hear people don’t read anymore. For my series La bibliothèque de …, there were very few people who refused to appear on the show because they hadn’t read any books lately.

Even book sales keep rising. It’s counterintuitive.

Gazette: Do you have any regrets about your time at the BAnQ?

Berthiaume: Every time you have to restrict opening hours, you go into mourning.

My other great disappointment is the magnificent project we had to create a teen library. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve wanted to create a place especially for adolescents. It almost came to fruition, but then there was a change of government (in 2012) — and it’s normal, governments want to re-examine projects, so I wasn’t able to make it a reality. I hope this project will be revived, because it’s so fundamental and important.

Gazette: What aspects of your experience here at the BAnQ do you think will prove the most relevant and useful at Library and Archives Canada?

Berthiaume: It’s all the work we did on the digitization of documents. Because what is radically different between the two institutions is that LAC is a national library and a national archives, but it does not have the mandate to serve as a public library as we do here. So it’s like the BAnQ without the Grande Bibliothèque.

We created a scanning service. We created a digitization budget of $1.5 million per year. We raised digitization to a professional level, because this is really the future of our collections and of our ability to render services with respect to heritage documents.

The other transferable skill is the capacity to work as a network, as a link in a chain. When you want to have access to our documents, whether the physical document is in Rimouski or Chicoutimi or in Trois-Rivières makes no difference to you. You just want to see it on your computer screen.

The same thing is true for Canada’s archival documents. Whether the original is at the University of Toronto or the University of Victoria or in the public archives in Ottawa, that’s not important. What you want is to see it on your screen.

Gazette: What are the greatest challenges facing you at LAC, and how do you plan to deal with them?

Berthiaume: First, it is very important to work with the employees to restore pride and a sense of belonging to the institution.

It’s not a spectacular job, it’s not a flashy job, but it is fundamental. It’s essential that people believe in what they are doing, that they are encouraged to do it, that they know they are making a contribution and that their work is respected. That is very important.

The other thing is to build bridges with partners and stakeholders, because that is the way of the future. We can no longer think that it’s possible to have every document in one place.

The Library of Alexandria (a great library in ancient Egypt that was destroyed under the Romans) has burned. And we can’t rebuild it — it’s no longer possible today. In Alexandria, Ptolemy could dream of having all the books because there was a limited quantity, but today there is such an explosion of information on the web, on blogs, people even write whole poems on Twitter. How can I think I can capture all of that in a single institution with limited budgets? The task is unlimited.

The third thing on which I will get to work very quickly when I arrive is the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017. This is an area where LAC’s collections will play a very important role so that Canadians can be proud of their documents.

Personally, I find it very moving when I go to the National Archives in Washington, to see Americans line up to see their documents, like the Declaration of Independence, and to see how emotional they are about those documents. I dream that one day Canadians have the same relationship towards their fundamental documents.

Gazette: How will you handle the challenges that lie ahead, given the major budget cuts at LAC?

Berthiaume: I would say that I think we have turned the corner.

There have been major budget cuts at LAC. I cannot deny that, but it’s over. The work has been done. The cuts have been absorbed. I do not believe — touch wood — that in the coming years we will see major upheavals comparable to those that have taken place in recent years.

Gazette: Library and Archives Canada stands at the intersection of history and the future. How do you see the institution’s role in bridging Canada’s past and its future?

Berthiaume: It is clear that institutions of memory are essential, especially in a young country like Canada, to help us understand ourselves and define ourselves.

We often tend to define ourselves negatively, by comparing ourselves to the United States, by saying we are not this or not that.

But we have our own history, our own storyline, and it is important to know that so we can project ourselves into the future.

This is why I plan to start preparing for 2017, because it will be a high point from which we can relaunch and redefine ourselves as Canadians.

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